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Month: June 2009

I’ll admit this post is long overdue. I’m sitting here staging a new server for a client and just finished running through these steps on their server, so I figured now was a good time to post since the process is fresh in my head. Particularly, the task at hand is to configure companyweb on our SBS 2008 to properly index Office 2007 documents and PDF documents, so their contents will appear in SharePoint search results.

Yes, you read the correctly. Small Business Server 2008’s companyweb does not index Office 2007 documents out of the box – I kid you not . . .

Luckily, getting Office 2007 documents to show up in companyweb search results is simple enough, all you have to do is download and install the Office 2007 iFilter from Microsoft on your SBS server. When downloading, obviously be sure to download the 64-bit version of the filter pack.

After installing the Office 2007 iFilter, we need to install a PDF iFilter as well. Luckily, Adobe has released a 64-bit version of their PDF iFilter, which you can download here. Unlike the Microsoft Filter Pack, there is some manual configuration to complete after we install the Adobe PDF iFilter:

On your SBS, run regedit and navigate to the following registry key: HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\Search\Applications\<GUID>\Gather\Search\Extensions\ExtensionList\

Right-click on the ExtensionList key and select New –> String Value

Enter 38 for the new string value and hit Enter

Double-click on the 38 string value you just created to edit its value. In the Value Data box that opens, type pdf then click OK.

Locate the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\Search\Setup\ContentIndexCommon\Filters\Extension\.pdf key and verify it contains the following registry entry:

You will most likely need to edit this entry so its value matches the GUID listed above.

Locate the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\12.0\Search\Setup\Filters\.pdf subkey and verify it contains the following entries:

Name: (Default) Type: REG_SZ Data: (value not set)

Name: Extension Type: REG_SZ Data: pdf

Name: FileTypeBucket Type: REG_DWORD Data: 0x00000001 (1)

Name: MimeTypes Type: REG_SZ Data: application/pdf

That completes the installation / configuration of our iFilters. If you haven’t already fixed the SharePoint Gatherer 2436 errors on your SBS yet, be sure to do so now. (Check out the Official SBS blog’s post on the topic).

So, once you have your iFilters installed & configured, and you have your SharePoint Gatherer 2436 errors resolved, we just want to bounce IIS then force SharePoint to start a full reindex of your companyweb site to index any Office 2007 and PDF files you have previously uploaded:

Once the fullcrawlstart command completes successfully, SharePoint will start reindexing your site(s) and you should start seeing search results in companyweb within a few minutes, although it may take longer for the site to be fully indexed depending on how much content you have in your site.